AI - mightier than the sword?

Distinguished linguist Professor Naomi Baron, whose new book Who Wrote This? How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing is 'under contract' (which could mean anything...

<autobiographical-note>

In my brief time editing at Macdonald & Co. (soon, when I arrived, to become part of Robert Maxwell's ill-starred empire BPCC), I inherited dozens of titles that had been under contract (and repeatedly not delivered) for years. My chief responsibility, I soon realized, was to cancel them; I didn't last long.

</autobiographical-note>

...but I look forward to the book's apperarance).

In the meantime she has written about ChatGPT. an article whose discovery is an example of the chief reason for my contuing to maintain a very modest presence on Twitter as @leBobEnchainé; it lets you get to hear about interesting stuff that's in the pipeline.

Tools like ChatGPT are only the latest in a progression of AI programs for editing or generating text. In fact, the potential for AI undermining both writing skills and motivation to do your own composing has been decades in the making.

The academic world was intially fearful about tools like ChatGPT on the grounds that they would make cheating easier to do and harder to detect. But the possibilities are much more serious and far-reaching than that. She goes on:

In literate societies, writing has long been recognized as a way to help people think. Many people have quoted author Flannery O’Connor’s comment that “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” A host of other accomplished writers, from William Faulkner to Joan Didion, have also voiced this sentiment. If AI text generation does our writing for us, we diminish opportunities to think out problems for ourselves.

One eerie consequence of using programs like ChatGPT to generate language is that the text is grammatically perfect. A finished product. It turns out that lack of errors is a sign that AI, not a human, probably wrote the words, since even accomplished writers and editors make mistakes. Human writing is a process. We question what we originally wrote, we rewrite, or sometimes start over entirely.

This seems to be serious; and possibly it is. But some years back I wrote about the advent of desktop publishing and my kneejerk reaction against it, and then on mature reflection my growing sense that – although uncomfortable for the publishing industry – it was probably a Good Thing. I'm not convinced in the case of AI, but I am aware that when new technology changes things, people with a vested interest in the past oppose it – often by pointing at what we're losing; what they ignore is what is to be gained by the change. So I'm not going to rush to judgment (and yes, spellchecker, I do spell it that way).

<autobiographical-note>
Somewhere in Knowles Towers there is a copy of an unpublished article that I wrote - many years pre-blog - about how authors writing on computers meant that users of libraries bequeathed literary archives would no longer be able to piece together the genesis of a literary work, with substitutions and crossings out and reorganizations.
</autobiographical-note>

The naming of characters 

Just reporting an aperçu here. I was watching the new Pinocchio over Christmas (or rather the first 10 minutes; Oscar? Can't see what all the fuss is about). And as a result found that the eponymous wooden boy was named after the tree that his 'father' cut down; it was a pine tree – un pino.

<parenthesis>
And I suppose the creation of the name may have been influenced by one of the church-goers who reacted against the graven image ('... or the likeness of anything, either in the heavens above or the Earth beneath' as we used to say in RC circles). She used the term malocchio (='evil eye'). But I don't know whether this was a later addition by Guillermo...

<autobiographical-note>
The older of my brothers – in his mid-teens when I was learning to talk – was sensitive about being addressed with a name that sounded ( in my version of 'William') like 'women'. He had recently had a holiday in Spain, and knew the word Guillermo. So he tried to get me to use that instead. Until I could get my tongue around 'William'  I called him 'Gammo'.
</autobiographical-note>

...del Toro's scriptwriter. 
</parenthesis>

If he had been made from a balsa tree, he might've been called "Balsacchio", which might be thought to be a bit near the knuckle.

Word-watch

I met a new word earlier this week: alexithymia (which loosely translates to “no words for emotion” ' as Wikipedia puts it [I wonder who was the subject of that conversation]. As I usually do with words new to me, I tried to break it down into bits of words already familiar to me. The a- (as in 'aphasia') was obvious enough, and the -lexi- (as in 'dyslexia'). But what about the -thym-?

This is where a distant memory came to my rescue. In the 1950s, when advertising copy writers had a classical education,  household products had names with a classical pedigree like Vim (strength), Lux  (light), or Bovril (beef). There was a brand of toothpaste whose name  seemed strange to me when my family used to use it. 

Some of these products have survived more or less unchanged, and  Euthymol is one (with a reassuringly archaic design). And at last all is clear: eu- as in 'eulogy',' euthanasia', 'eucharist'...; -thym-' as in ... ALEXITHYMIA. It's all about feeling well. Whoever thought of that must have been very proud of themselves, but I don't imagine many of the product's users know or care.

L'envoi

And, in re HMRC and the tax dispute, I'm sick of people sanctimoniously trotting out that thing about the age-old British principle of 'Innocent until proven guilty'. That's about criminal proceedings, and we're not there (yet?). A decent person would have stood down pending investigation. Never mind 'Innocent until proven guilty'. What about 'Decent until proven duplicitous'?

Things to do.

b

Net Contribution to the Age-appropriate Supply of Housing...

... or  NCASH.

The sadly-limited range ....

<autobiographical-note type="I can remember when all this was fields">
When I moved out of London nearly 40 years ago Spencers Wood was semi-rural.  Now it's almost exclusively urban – with few of the benefits of a largely green environment combined with the drawbacks of nose-to-tail traffic,  precious few buses, and a dearth of social and commercial infrastructure.
</autobiographical-note>

...of walks in my vicinity  include routes through two housing estates (well several, actually, but two of relevance here) , one developed in the 1970-'80s and one developed more recently (and still they come). The older one has a fair few bungalows; in fact it has a range of building types. The newer one is a mono-culture suitable for families (young and established) with a few flats for young professionals. Nothing suitable for older people; I shudder to think what it'll be like in 50 years.

An article in the latest edition of Third Age Matters mourns the lack  of suitable new housing for the less spritely:

...Third Agers often feel that suitable smaller housing is not available. The much maligned bungalow is still the housing of choice for many older people as they usually have all the facilities of a house, including private garden and off-road parking, but with the additional benefit of single-level living. But they are in short supply.

It goes on to discuss the reasons for this, which all boil down to one thing: the planning system is seriously flawed. It is based on a single-minded, short-term,, simplistic metric: occupancy per hectare . The only way to get more people onto each hectare is to build upwards. So older people can't buy new  properties –  except in purpose-built ghettoes...

<old-joke> 

Some wag doctored a road sign marking Dover for the Continent and Eastbourne. The additional words were for the incontinent.

</old-joke>

... – either these, or sheltered housing/assisted living/...<insert-euphemism-here>.

Meanwhile, older householders are rattling around in multi-storey houses that they can't maintain and want to move out of; as that article says:                        

Press reports have highlighted the massive amount of housing space tied up by pensioners, often living alone in four-bedroom houses. A report from Legal & General estimated some 7.5 million rooms could be available if the occupiers were to downsize to smaller accommodation.

But old people need to live with young people, and vice versa. My family home in the '60s-'70s was a sort of informal youth club, open all hours, to the benefit of all involved whatever their age.

<modest-proposal comment="This is my theory, and it is mine. Ahem.">
To ensure a healthy mixture of young and old in new housing estates (which will not be new for long, and  they need to continue to house a mentally healthy population) occupancy standards need to be changed to take into account the net effect of new developments. If a developer can arrange for an old householder to buy a bungalow, they should be able to factor that person's property into their calculations: planning standards must be based on NCASH.
</modest-proposal>

And fonally ...

<sic> 

This isn't a typo, or rather it was a typo in 1972 in a script I contributed to a review called 'How Big Were Luther's Theses?' – but ever since then whenever I think 'And finally' my private monologue misreads it.

</sic>

...

My habitual equanimity is frequently disturbed in the last few weeks by the TV trailer for the new series of  Waterloo Road, which has a voiceover saying 'At Waterloo Road we pride ourselves in (sic)...'.

At this stage I lose focus, and can't take in what they're proud about, because in my world you 'pride yourself on something'. I suspected when I first heard this that there had been interference –  or crosstalk –

<autobiographical-note>
'Crosstalk' is a bit of jargon I came across when my middle brother (RIP) was an apprentice at DECCA. In a vinyl record, the interference between one groove and its neighbouring groove is crosstalk. Come to think of it, it's not a very  illuminating metaphor; it's just a memory that   occurred to me, and I thought I might as well clutter your minds up with it too.
</autobiographical-note>

... from the expression 'take pride in', which just happens to inhabit the same semantic area (although not being a synonym). And having thought this, I felt I should put some numbers on it. Here they are, based on two corpuses (or corpora if you must   –  ...

<autobiographical-note>
I've been suspicious of $10 words like that ever since a GP diagnosed my unexplained slight temperatures (in boyhood) as 'PUO'. 'PUO' stands for Pyrexia of Unknown Origin, or in other words 'he has a temperature and I don't know why'.
</autobiographical-note>

 .... Fancy words are often a disguise for ignorance) the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American.

First pride ourselves *n (the * is just a wildcard; I could make the enquiry more general: pride *sel* *n, to include myself, themselves... etc, but I've already spent too long on this):

This seems fairly clear, In an admittedly small corpus (relatively small, that is, among corpuses, but still pretty extensive), 'Pride ourselves on' outnumbers the 'in' version 10:1  (11:1 if you include 'upon').

And the 'take pride in' expression is more unanimous; nobody says 'take pride on' (well not yet anyway).

Meanwhile in COCA the difference is less marked, though still over 4:1.

And the 'take pride *n' variants are pretty unanimous, although a tiny percentage of users (0.0022%) have written 'take pride on' (which I'd put down to interference in the opposite direction – from 'pride oneself on' to 'take pride in').

But this is beginning to fail in the 'So What? Stakes'.

b

Update: 2023.01.12.20:55 – Added PS

PS
I can't be the only one who found 'pride ourselves on' disturbing (or at least distracting). There's now a new version of the trailer, with the same images but a new opening line.

And now all this

De-noelification has occurred. (And don't bother looking that one up; it's home-made). None of this 'The decorations stay up until twelfth night' business; not chez Knowles. The old year was be-tinselled (another roll-up, I'm afraid). But it is a Knowles tradition that New Year's Day is marked by the removal of all signs of merry-making, accompanied by the New Year's Day Concert from Vienna. The lion's share (lioness's share, come to  think of it) of the removal was done by MrsK, but it fell to me to disentangle the two strings of lights after their hasty (and somewhat unscientific, if you ask me) removal from the tree.

<autobiographical-note type ="rant">
It was the work of minutes to separate the two, apart from one loop; so it should have been a simple matter of removing one end of the wire from the plug and passing it through the loop. But I reckoned without the Health and Safety Executive. There was a 'safety plug' (a sealed unit, un-unscrewable), so I had to either cut one wire and then join it together again (how would the HSE like that?) or cut the idiot-proof plug off and replace it with a proper (i.e. serviceable, no really, serviceable) one.

I opted for the latter, not without a searing sense of annoyance at having to waste half an hour doing the thing properly, because of being taken for a numpty. Just because a few idiots can't be trusted to wire a plug safely the rest of us have to waste time on workarounds for things that shouldn't need to be worked around. But I digress.
</autobiographical-note>

Monday's job was the dismemberment of the Christmas tree (the stripping of the tree, I suppose, neatly book-ending the process that started with the dressing of the tree). And I was struck again by a question that doesn't occur to the blissfully uncluttered minds of those who know the song only in the English version:

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree,

How lovely are thy branches!

But the Tannenbaum, to give it its due, isn't like that at all:

O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,

Wie treu sind deine Blätter.

Not 'branches', 'leaves'; not 'lovely', but 'true/loyal/faithful/ constant...'.

<tangent type="Aha, not thought of that in a while">
In  both German and English, the words for 'leaf' and 'sheet of paper' are the same. Another Germanic language, Norwegian, has the famous periodical (originally a 'daily [news]-sheet', though now it's a tabloid) Dagbladet.  Latin too, though I'd guess the Romans didn't have much cause to talk about sheets of paper, pre-Gutenberg. Etymonline makes the English usage a borrowing from Late Latin:

</tangent> 

Two recent memories

Yuletide media consumption has sparked a couple of memories:

Sign salvaged from
the ABC Forum, Easling

• A TV repeat of Zulu on New Year's Eve reminded me of the guilt that prevented me enjoying the latter part of the film when I first saw it, aged 12, at the ABC Forum in Ealing (since its redevelopment in 1975,  commemorated chiefly in this sign, shown here):
  
  Egged on by my middle brother (a Bad Influence, RIP), we paid for the 1/9s (that's just under 9p) and moved, via the gents, to the half-crown seats (12½p). I was sure for the rest of the film that we were going to be called out as juvenile delinquents.
  
  
• Hugh Bonneville, interviewed on a post-Christmas Newscast filler, recalled what to some listeners must have seemed an improbably violent attack made on his sister with a sledgehammer because she had stuck her tongue out at him. Sisters sticking their tongues out can inspire acts of improbable violence in the most peaceful of boys. In my case it was half a brick, rather than a sledgehammer.
  
  She (I'm not sure she was alone, but I'm pretty sure my middle sister was the tongue-protruder) was retreating up a fire escape leading to the habitable part of the house.. The missile fell far short of its target, between two treads (there were no risers), and smashed the window of the semi-basement's bathroom (newly refurbished as a self-contained flat), chipping the newly installed bath.
  
  I remember no repercussions. Daddy (who died the day before my 10 birthday, so he's still 'Daddy') was probably abroad at the time, and my mother (whom saints preserve and they better had) understood how annoying older sisters can be.

Onward and upward.

b